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Why Your Favourite Low Fat Food Isn’t Always Good For You

If you take a look around any supermarket, you will find plenty of foods that claim to be low fat. Although eating a diet that is low in bad fats is essential, these foods are often made low fat by instead making them high in carbohydrates. Fat is flavour, and when the fat is removed, the flavour is as well. Manufacturers then have to add flavour back in, usually by adding sugar or salt. Doing this ratchets up the carbohydrate count, making these ‘good for you’ foods anything but.

When the diet is too high in simple carbohydrates, the liver and pancreas get overwhelmed trying to process them. Over time, this leads to chronic illnesses like diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease. The body cannot properly process large amounts of high-sugar foods. Blood sugar spikes enormously and causes headaches, weight gain, and cravings. These peaks and valleys in the blood system eventually wear at the organs and can lead to systemic shutdown of essential body functions.

Examining some popular low-fat food available, it is astounding the amount of sugar in one serving. For example, Jell-O Fat Free Pudding Cup 100 Calorie Chocolate Vanilla Swirl has 17g of sugar in 100 calories. The basic formula for grams and calories is 4 calories per gram of carbohydrates. Using this math, 68% of the calories in this snack are from sugar. Removing the fat certainly left a lot of room to add more sugar! A popular fat-free drink, Nesquick Fat Free Chocolate Milk has a serving size of 16 oz, at a total of 300 calories. The nutrition label shows a whopping 54 grams of sugar, or 72% of calories from sugar.[1] Consuming these foods could be compared to simply eating the same amount of pure glucose, for the reaction it has in your blood stream. Since there is no fat and not much protein, there is nothing to balance the high sugars. The body will attempt to metabolize the food very quickly, and without fat or protein to slow it down, blood sugar will skyrocket.

It is always best to choose whole foods as much as possible, especially when snacking. There is so much temptation in the form of attractively packaged good with big ‘low-fat!’ claims on the front, but always make sure you take a close look at the entire nutrition label for added sugars, especially when choosing something low-fat.